For us modern folks, it can be hard to understand the worldview of ancient people. They didn't know about outer space or the heliocentric view of the solar system, but they did their best to understand the world given the information they had at hand. In fact, the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Europe didn't even think of the sky as a separate realm the way Indo-European cultures did. So what does that mean in terms of the way the Minoans viewed the cosmos?

You're probably familiar with the three-worlds cosmos that many pre-Christian Indo-European cultures had. The Norse version is especially popular, given that J.R.R. Tolkien adapted it for his own imaginary world. In the three-worlds view, the 'top' or upper world is the sky; the middle realm is the Earth and the area right above it where people and animals live; and the lower realm is beneath the Earth - the Underworld.

As I see it, there are three pillars of the Kemetic religion(s), in all its (or their) many forms. These pillars are: The gods, the practices, and the concept of ma'at. It is this third, ma'at, that I will be discussing in this particular post.

Ma'at is often translated as Truth, Justice, Good, Order, or Cosmic Order. It is all of those things at once, in a way that can't be adequately conveyed with any one of the above English words or phrases. For the Egyptians, the stability of the cosmos was not a fundamentally different thing from a king ruling justly. They were both manifestations of ma'at, and the lack thereof (an unstable cosmos, an unjust king, with the resulting disorder in the land) would be considered a lack of ma'at, and signs of its opposite, isfet (often translated as "evil" or "disorder".)